Archives for :
October2013

In part A of our two part Reformation special, we took a look at the events, people, and circumstances leading up to the posting of the 95 Theses in Whittenburg, with clips from the 1953 movie “Martin Luther”.

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The “Halloween is pagan”/”only pagans observe Halloween” crowd is up to their annual hand-wringing antics again as we approach the end of the month. Pastor Joseph Abrahamson put out a great article about the real story behind Halloween last year, and it’s not what the neo-pagans (or your wide-eyed neighbors) have told you.

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We went through the book of Jude, remarking on his citation of the book of Enoch and other such oddities. During the Inquisition, Pastor and Thomas answered listener questions about Zionism. Kind of a punchy episode.

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We tackled 2nd and 3rd John, speculating that these might be sister letters sent to a church and their pastor (see 3rd John 9a). Inquisition: Thomas talked about his pet peeves with evidential apologetics, and Pastor spoke on Calvinism.

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Secularists (and even some who call themselves Christians) accuse Christian creationism of being scientifically bankrupt and behind the times. Often, there is an attempt to compare the belief in creationism to flat-earth ideas, or earth-centered solar system beliefs of the past. It is asserted that Christians are on the wrong side of scientific history in the area of creationism (rejecting evolution), just as [what is supposed to be] the entire Church historic believed in a flat earth (rejecting a round one) until Columbus proved them wrong. And so on.

You get the idea.

Anyway, in this Link to the Post I’m putting up several articles from Creation.com on the truth of the history of the Church’s stances on these issues (and it’s not what your secularist neighbors told you!).

So, here is the first bit of each article and the link to it for your edification.

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Evolutionists often falsely accuse creationists of believing in a flat Earth. But neither history nor modern scholarship supports the claim that Christians ever widely believed that the Earth was flat. And the Bible doesn’t teach it.

Christianity has often been accused of opposing science and hindering technology throughout history by superstitious ignorance. However, a closer study of historical facts shows that this accusation is ill-founded.

Creationists are often accused (by Christians opposed to their view) of making the same mistake as the Roman Catholic Church did at the time of Galileo. Then, the institutional Church insisted that the Bible taught that the sun went around the earth. After it was shown by Galileo that the opposite was true, believers found that they could comfortably accommodate this new fact, without any problem to their belief in the Bible. However, the historical events surrounding Galileo should be a warning to theistic evolutionists and long-agers, not to the Genesis creation movement.

This year is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), and it’s no accident that assorted atheists are making sure that everyone knows that. But they have some competition from those wanting to name 2009 as the “International Year of Astronomy”, because it’s the quadricentennial of the first use of the telescope by Galileo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei (1564–1642), usually known by his first name only. Not to be outdone, the atheists have long used Galileo as a story of “science versus religion”. So what are the facts?

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We finished off 1st John! During the inquisition, Pastor talked about how those in antiquity viewed the ancient world vs. how we today view what has gone before. Thomas talked about the significance of Lutheranism in apologetics.

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This is another post relating to the subject of profanity. This is a 12 minute video where Doug Wilson answers the question of whether it’s appropriate to – as a writer – make use of cuss words and for what purposes. The question takes a different angle than Thomas’ question to Pastor in episode 18 (i.e. a writer’s perspective, not a consumer’s as Thomas’ was), and the answer – which is perfectly in harmony with Pastor’s – is thus a different angle on the topic as well.

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This post is directly tied to Pastor and Thomas’ conversation in episode 18 about the proper translation of the Greek word “skubalon” used by the Apostle Paul in Philippians 3:8 (discussed in the broader context of the Christian approach to “cuss” words). Among Christians, Daniel B. Wallace is considered one if the premier Greek and New Testament scholars of our time; he wrote an article on this subject some years back, and it seemed right to link to it here.

For those who simply want to get the gist without reading Wallace’s entire article, I give you his conclusion:

In Phil 3:8, the best translation of skuvbala seems clearly to be from the [dung/excrement] definitions. The term conveys both revulsion and worthlessness in this context. In hellenistic Greek it seems to stand somewhere between “crap” and “s**t.” However, due to English sensibilities, and considering the readership (Christians), a softer term such as “dung” is most appropriate. The NET Bible, along with a few other translations, grasp the connotations here, while most modern translations only see the term as implying worthlessness. But Paul’s view of his former life is odious to him, as ours should be to us. The best translation, therefore, is one that picks up both worthlessness and revulsion, and probably a certain shock value.

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We jumped back into the text and enjoyed an excursus on creedal, faith defining matters. Inquisition: Thomas talked about the matter of politics in apologetics; Pastor spoke about the Christian approach to obscenity and vulgarity.